A new sutureless method for the anastomosis of blood vessels.

When large numbers of battle casualties arrive at a field hospital, the requisite skills, facilities, and time may not be available to perform all necessary, but non-life-threatening, end-to-end vascular anastomoses with sutures. A sutureless concept was proposed in which the proximal and distal ends of a severed vessel are everted over ferrules, and then the everted ends are held together with a low-temperature, biocompatible, heat-shrinkable sleeve. Two essential elements in the sutureless concept, a surgical vascular everting instrument and the heat-shrinkable sleeve, have been developed, and the sutureless technique has been demonstrated on one laboratory animal.